Fueros de Sobrarbe information

The Fueros de Sobrarbe (Spanish: [ˈfweɾos ðe soˈβɾaɾβe]; lit. Charters of Sobrarbe) are a mythical set of charters allegedly enacted during the 850s in the Pyrenean valley of Sobrarbe. The Fueros were said to have been issued by Christian refugees fleeing from the Muslim invasion of the Iberian peninsula, and enshrined the aragonese legal custom of placing laws before kings.^[1] Although the charters were extensively studied and exploited in later centuries, modern scholarship regards them as a fabrication.^[1]

In the 13th century, the cities and the nobility of the kingdoms of Navarre and of Aragon started using these legendary fueros as a foundation for their own legal rights and privileges. The first historical mention of the Fueros de Sobrarbe appears in this context, as part of a falsified version of the original city charter of Tudela backdated to 1117. The original charter of Tudela, likely issued in 1119-1121, was manipulated sometime at the beginning of the reign of Theobald I of Navarre (r.1234-1253). Having inherited a distant kingdom from his maternal uncle, Theobald I agreed to have the customary laws of his newly acquired realm codified, and the citizens of Tudela presented the crown with a forged version of their own city charter that mentioned for the first time the Fueros de Sobrarbe as the foundation of their historical rights. In 1237, Theobald I agreed to confirm this manipulated charter. Thereafter, the Fueros de Sobrarbe were included in many of the city charters of Aragonese and Navarrese frontier towns, and eventually made it to both the Fueros of Navarre (1238) and the Fueros de Aragon (1283). In both of them, the Fueros are mentioned as the historical foundation of those kingdoms and their institutions.

The Fueros de Sobrarbe and their creation were described in detail by the legal historian Jerónimo Blancas in his Aragonensium rerum commentarii, first published in 1587.^[2] As his predecessors before him, Blancas used the Fueros as a means of justifying several aspects of Aragonese law, particularly the institution of the Justicia de Aragon and the legal precept that royal authority was bound by laws, rather than a source thereof. Modern historiography regards the Fueros de Sobrarbe themselves as a medieval forgery, and the High Middle Ages versions described by Blancas as a fabrication to which many different authors contributed over several centuries, starting in the mid-13th century with the charter of Tudela.^[1]

The significance of the Fueros de Sobrarbe lies not in their lack of historicity, but in the verisimilitude they were awarded up until the 18th century, both as the constitutional foundation of many of the institutions of the kingdoms of Navarre and Aragon, and because they enshrined the legal principle of placing "laws before kings".^[1]